The Eighth Sister

by Robert Dugoni

  “A car, parked at the back of the building.” She moved to the door beneath the red exit sign at the end of the hall, opened it, and looked up and down the stairwell. Jenkins listened for footfalls, hearing none. She gestured for him to follow. They descended the stairwell, stopping every so often to listen. Hearing no other footsteps, they continued to the bottom floor. Again, the woman peered out a crack in the door before she stepped into the hall and turned to her right, winding her way through abandoned hallways, Jenkins following.

  They emerged in a darkened dining area and hurried across the room, exiting to another hallway. They continued until they heard voices and music.

  “The hotel bar,” she said, pulling Jenkins to her as she backed up against one of the marbled pillars. They resembled lovers, perhaps discussing whose room they would use to continue their evening.

  She whispered to him as she ran her hands over his shoulders. “The back entrance to the hotel is just down the marble steps. I will go first. Wait five minutes before you walk outside.”

  “I don’t think so,” he whispered back. “We haven’t exactly developed that kind of trust.”

  “Then I suggest you develop it,” she said. “At the moment they don’t know what I look like, only my disguise. If I walk out that door I am a woman who was drinking in the bar. If you walk out that door with me and they are watching, you blow my cover.”

  Jenkins knew the woman’s anonymity would allow her to walk out the door. He also knew it was a possibility she would get in her car and not look back, leaving him to fend for himself. He also knew he didn’t have much choice.

  “Two minutes,” he said.

  “Five minutes,” she said, more forcefully.

  “Why five?”

  “Because the Bolshoi gets out in five minutes. In five minutes you walk out the back door and cross the street to the fountain. If anyone is following, lose them in the crowd exiting the Bolshoi.”

  “And then what? Where am I going?”

  “To the ballet. Everyone will be coming out. You will be going in.”

  “How—”

  She spoke over him. “Listen. We don’t have time for questions. If anyone stops you, tell them you left your jacket and gloves at the coat check. Inside, there will be another crowd. Follow the signs to the coat check. Just past it you will find a door. Go through it. The hallway leads backstage to where performers change. There is a back exit the performers use to avoid the crowds at the front of the building.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Listen carefully,” she said, more urgently. “Go out the back door. You will be in an alley. Cross it to the building behind the Bolshoi. There is a restaurant on the second floor where many in the Bolshoi go after the performance, and so the door in the alley will be unlocked. Climb the stairs to the second floor. You will be arriving through the back entrance, but do not go into the restaurant. You will see a metal cage blocking a staircase to your right. The metal cage is broken. Open it and descend one flight. You will have to cross a darkened hall leading to an exit into a second alley. I will flash the car’s headlights once. Can you remember this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me the gun,” she said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If I am accosted and have to kill someone, I must do so quickly and quietly.”

  “So must I.”

  “Yes, but without a car, neither of us is getting very far, very fast, and not likely alive.”

  Again, Jenkins couldn’t fault her logic, but logic and trust weren’t the same thing, and giving up his only weapon to someone who hadn’t yet earned his trust—far from it. But, as she said, what choice did he have? They couldn’t walk out of the hotel together, and they wouldn’t get far without a car.

  “What do I do while I’m waiting?”

  “Use the bathroom.” She looked to her left. Jenkins saw the men’s room door just behind the marbled pillar.

  Reluctantly, he lifted his shirt. She grabbed the Ruger, slipping it in the waistband of her jeans and covering it with her sweater.

  “Pozhelay mne udachi,” she said. Wish me luck.

  Paulina Ponomayova tilted her head and let the bangs of the black wig flow across the left side of her face, hoping the hair and the glasses would cover much of her left eye, which was already swelling shut. She stepped past a security guard standing beside the first set of glass doors.

  “Mogu li ya pomoch’?” he said. May I be of assistance?

  Ponomayova kept her eyes down. “Nyet, spasibo.”

  The second set of doors separated with a whoosh, and the Moscow cold cut through her sweater and stung her uncovered face and hands. She moved purposefully past Mercedes and BMW sedans parked in stalls beneath poles displaying the flags of numerous countries. The valet sat inside a green wooden kiosk. A black-and-white wooden arm extended across the parking lot exit. The valet had the door to the shack closed against the cold. As Ponomayova neared, he slid the door open a crack. Ponomayova felt a blast of warm air from an electric heater beneath the man’s sitting stool.

  He put his hand through the opening, and she handed him the valet tag. He matched the tag to a set of keys among several sets hanging on hooks along the back wall of the shack.

  “It will just be a minute,” he said, getting up from the stool.

  “Nyet,” she said, holding out five rubles. “No reason for us both to be cold.”

  He smiled and took the money. “Spasibo. I don’t remember a January this bad in quite some time.” He stepped from the shack and pointed to the back of the lot. “There, you see it?”

  “Da,” she said.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, staring at the side of her face.

  “Da,” she said. “Just a small accident.”

  Ponomayova crossed the lot to her car, an unassuming gray Hyundai Solaris. Across the street, the well-lit walls of the Kremlin illuminated the filtered winter haze that continued to suffocate the city. She clicked the button and unlocked her car door. As she did, she heard a man speaking in a rushed tone.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

  Ponomayova froze. “Da,” she said, without turning.

  “We are looking for someone,” the man said. “Can you look at this picture?”

  Ponomayova turned but kept her head tilted to the left and allowed the hair to obscure that side of her face. The man, whom she did not recognize, held a photograph in an outstretched arm. Charles Jenkins.

  “Nyet,” she said. “I have not seen him.”

  “And what is your business at the hotel tonight?”

  She smiled. “What business is my business of yours?”

  “Tell me . . . what happened to your eye?”

  “Piss off.”

  The man held up identification. FSB. “Tell me.”

  “I walked into a door. Too much vodka.”

  The man put away his credentials. “Identification, please.”

  Paulina recalled a time when no Russian would refuse to produce identification, but that had been the old Russia. “I don’t carry identification with me when I’m out drinking. It is too easy to lose.”

  “Identification,” the man said, more forcefully.

  “Okay. Okay. It’s in the car is all I meant. Give me a second.”

  Ponomayova reached for the door handle with her left hand and grabbed the butt of the gun with her right. In one quick motion, she turned, raised the nozzle, and fired. The gun made a pfft sound, the noise partially masked by Moscow’s traffic. The man dropped like a sack between the two parked cars. Blood trickled from the nickel-size hole in his forehead. Ponomayova pulled open her car door and quickly slid behind the wheel. She turned the key. The engine groaned but did not kick over.

  “Shit,” she said and tried again. The engine struggled, then kicked to life.

  She backed from the stall slowly, not wanting to draw attention to herself or the body on the ground. She drove around the lot to the valet shack and rai
sed a hand as if to wave but actually to block the valet’s view of her face. The wooden arm raised and she departed, breathing a heavy sigh of relief.

  Charles Jenkins checked his watch as he stepped into the men’s room. Elevator music played from ceiling speakers, a Russian version of an American song. His intent was to go into one of the stalls but that changed instantly. A solitary man stood in a black leather coat at one of several urinals mounted on the wall. Arkady Volkov.

  Before Jenkins could retreat, Volkov turned, in the process of zipping his fly. He froze. A fraction of a second passed before the recognition registered, but that was all Jenkins needed. Volkov’s eyes widened and his right arm swept across his body, but Jenkins, without a weapon, had rushed forward. He hit Volkov, and the two men crashed through a stall door, stumbled around the toilet, and fell against the tiled wall. Jenkins had one hand on Volkov’s face, fingers gouging at his eyes. His other hand gripped the hand holding the butt of Volkov’s weapon, which the Russian was struggling to pull from its holster. Volkov’s other hand was under Jenkins’s chin, forcing his head back at an unnatural angle. The two men stumbled for leverage inside the stall, twisting and turning. Volkov was as strong as he looked—his short arms as powerful as pistons. Despite Jenkins’s efforts, he felt Volkov’s hand pulling the gun from its holster, and he knew he would lose this battle of strength. He had to use Volkov’s strength against him.

  Jenkins relaxed his right hand. Volkov’s head shot forward. When it did, Jenkins issued a short, sharp blow with the palm of his hand, driving the back of Volkov’s head against the tiled wall. The tile cracked and shattered. He slammed Volkov’s head a second time and a third, but the gun continued to progress, the nozzle turning, now just inches from Jenkins’s stomach.

  Jenkins grabbed Volkov by his collar and spun him, shoving him out the stall door and across the bathroom. They hit the far wall together. Jenkins pirouetted, and used centrifugal force to spin Volkov a second time, this time slamming his back hard against one of the urinals. The porcelain cracked and a portion of the urinal crashed to the floor, water spraying from the broken pipe. Volkov groaned in pain. Jenkins spun him again, this time across the room, slamming Volkov’s back into the sink counter, then spun him yet again, hoping to disorient him, back toward the urinals. Volkov’s feet slipped on the wet floor, and the two men stumbled and fell. Jenkins lost his grip on Volkov’s hand holding the gun, and it jerked from his grasp.

  Jenkins rolled and picked up the broken urinal. A bullet pinged off the porcelain just before he slammed it down on Volkov’s arm, which the Russian had moved to cover his face. Jenkins heard a sickening crack, this time not the porcelain. The Russian’s limbs twitched, then stopped moving.

  Breathing heavily, Jenkins grabbed the weapon and struggled to his feet, about to stumble to the door. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, his shirt torn and wet, and his face scratched. He turned back to Volkov and quickly moved the urinal. He yanked off Volkov’s leather coat and slid it on. The coat was tight across the back, and the sleeves ended above his wrists. It would have to do. He shoved Volkov’s gun in the waistband of his pants and held the coat over it. Then he took a deep breath and pulled the door open. Stepping out, he nearly collided with a man, stumbling drunk, about to enter.

  “Ya by vospol’zovalsya vannoy na vtorom etazhe-skazal on,” he said. “Kto-to ostavil ogromnuyu kuchu der’ma na polu.” I would use the bathroom down the hall. Someone left a huge pile of shit on the floor of this one.

  Viktor Federov stood in the hotel lobby, listening to the desk clerk provide a description of the woman. Federov snapped his fingers and another FSB officer brought him a coat and a scarf. “Is this the coat and scarf?”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  Federov tossed the coat back to the second officer. “You said she wore glasses? Describe them.”

  “Big. Round. The frames were clear.”

  “What color were her eyes?”

  “They were a light color . . . blue, I believe. Maybe hazel or green.”

  Federov spoke to the man holding the jacket and scarf. “Not likely if her hair was that dark. Probably contact lenses or a wig, maybe both.”

  “Do you want a sketch artist?” the second officer asked.

  “No point,” Federov said. “It is doubtful the woman still looks anything like the woman this man is describing. Check every trash bin for a wig and glasses.”

  As the officer departed, Federov returned his attention to the clerk.

  “Tell me what this woman said when she approached you. Exactly, please?”

  “She said she had an appointment with Mr. Jenkins and asked for his room number.”

  “Anything else?”

  The man massaged his temples. “No.”

  “Think,” Federov said. “You are sure? Nothing else?”

  “No. Just that she wanted his room number.”

  “And you gave it to her.”

  “Not initially,” the man said. “There were others around. I followed her outside and gave her the room number.”

  Federov nodded. “How much did she pay you?”

  Beads of sweat marked the man’s forehead and upper lip. “I didn’t—”

  “How much?”

  “Ten thousand rubles.”

  Federov held out his hand. “I must confiscate the bribe. It is now evidence.”

  The clerk removed the rubles from his pocket and handed them to Federov, who shoved the bills into his pants pocket.

  Federov checked his watch. He’d sent Volkov to the bar twenty minutes earlier to ask those present if they had seen the woman or Jenkins. “Stay here. I may have more questions.” Federov started down the hall and flagged the second FSB officer. “See that the desk clerk does not leave.”

  Federov’s shoes slapped the marbled floor as he strode past the elevators and down a set of stairs to the hotel bar, which remained in full swing, men and woman seated at tables and bar stools. He looked for but did not see Volkov. He called Volkov’s cell phone but he did not answer, which was unlike him. Federov stepped to the bar and made eye contact with the bartender.

  “I’m looking for a man who was here asking questions about guests of the hotel. Short but very stocky.”

  “Yeah. He was just here.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “I saw him go down the steps to the bathroom.”

  Federov pulled out the picture of Jenkins. “Have you seen this man?”

  The bartender shook his head. “Nyet.”

  Federov descended the steps, pushed open the bathroom door, and stepped in. Water splashed beneath his shoes. Volkov lay on the floor in the corner, without his jacket, a broken urinal nearby.

  Federov hurried to him. He grabbed Volkov’s wrist. His pulse was weak but he remained alive. He looked for Volkov’s gun but did not see it. From the looks of the bathroom, there had been one hell of a fight. The only logical conclusion was Volkov had stumbled onto Jenkins and Jenkins was now likely armed. Federov stood and exited the bathroom, fishing in his pocket for the picture of Jenkins as he approached the hotel guard standing just inside sliding glass doors.

  Federov held up the picture and his FSB credentials. “Did this man leave the hotel?”

  “Yes, just a few minutes ago.”

  “You recall him?”

  “Definitely. He was wearing a black leather coat, but no hat or gloves. He said he left them in his car and was going out to retrieve them. He looked as if he’d been in a fight.”

  “Was he with a woman?”

  “No. He was alone.”

  Federov removed his cell phone from his pocket, punched in numbers, and spoke as he rushed out a second set of sliding doors into the hotel parking lot. His head swiveled left and right, his eyes searching for possible exits, and for the officer he had assigned to watch the back entrance and the parking lot. “I need you to perform a cleanup in the hotel bathroom near the bar,” he said into his phone. “Call an ambulance
but be discreet. I do not want any other police agencies involved. Then close the bar and clear it.”

  He disconnected. When he did not see the officer, he ran toward a valet seated inside a wooden shack. A couple stood outside the shack waiting to retrieve their car. Federov stepped to the front of the line and banged on the door. The young man quickly slid it open. Federov held up the picture of Jenkins and his FSB credentials. “Did you see this man leave?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then think more clearly. Did you see him?”

  “I didn’t see him,” the valet said. “But I’ve been running to and from cars, with the Bolshoi just getting out.”

  “What about a woman?”

  The young man frowned. “There have been a lot of women. What did she look like?”

  Federov turned toward the sound of a woman’s scream. He hurried across the lot to where a woman stood beside a man, both bundled in winter clothing, both staring at a body on the ground.

  “I nearly stepped on him when I got out of the car,” the man said to Federov. “I thought maybe he was homeless and had frozen to death.”

  Federov shoved the man aside and looked down at the FSB officer. He’d been shot in the forehead, a kill shot, the hole no larger than a nickel and the amount of blood minimal given the cold evening temperature.

  “Go inside and speak to the front desk,” he said to the man and woman. “Tell the man in the dark suit there’s a dead man in the parking lot. Go! Go!”

  The couple hurried across the lot to the back entrance of the hotel.

  Federov ran to the sidewalk and looked up and down the street, then across it to the plaza and the fountain. Behind it, people streamed out the doors of the Bolshoi. Jenkins could not have gone far. And he would seek a crowd to get lost in. Federov looked again to the Bolshoi’s exiting patrons.

  Charles Jenkins jogged across the street to the fountain. His confrontation with Volkov had left him several minutes behind schedule. Would the woman wait for him? Had she ever intended to wait for him?

  Couples bundled in winter clothing took selfies beside a fountain, but they quickly moved when he approached, no doubt deducing from his tattered and bloody appearance, and his lack of winter clothes, that he had to be insane. So much for blending in. Getting lost in a crowd would not be easy, nor would getting inside the Bolshoi.